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IRVING HOWE
Yugoslavia and destroys Vietnam, which provides food to India and
shores up dictators in Asia, which proclaims and begins a little to
enable the Alliance for Progress and sanctions the Dominican inter–
vention. The consequences are severe dislocations within the welfare
state, splits between groups oriented primarily toward the improve–
ment of their own conditions and groups oriented primarily toward
improving the place our society occupies within the world. Of this,
more later.
• Within its terms and limits the welfare state finds it very
difficult to provide avenues of fulfillment for many of the people
whose conditions it has helped to improve - the workers displaced
by automation, the Negroes given the vote but little else, the young
seeking work that makes sense. That is why there now appear new
formations, such as the subculture of the alienated young, respond–
ing primarily to their felt sense of the falseness of things.
If
the revolt
of the Radical Right was, in Richard Hofstadter's phrase, an outburst
of status politics - the anxious need of an insecure segment to assert
itself in the prestige hierarchy - then the revolt of the alienated young
is, among other things, an antistatus outburst - a wish to break loose
from the terms of categorization fixed by the society. That, in the
course of this effort, the young sometimes settle into categories, styles
and mannerisms quite as rigid as those against which they rebel, is
still another testimony to the power of repressive social arrangements.
v.
Politics of the Welfare State
The politics of the welfare state extends back into the early
twentieth century, through a variety of parallel and competing tradi–
tions - the labor movement, the Socialist movement, the various
liberal groups, the moral pressures exerted through Christian action,
the increasing role of the Jews as a liberal force. But for our present
purposes we can date the beginning of welfare-state politics as a style
of coalition to the early thirties and perhaps even more precisely to
the election of 1932, one of the few in American history which marked
a major realignment of political forces. In that election the unions
began to play the powerful role they would command during the next
few decades; large numbers of Negroes began their historic switch
to the Democratic Party; ·the city machines found it expedient to go
along with Roosevelt's policies. And soon significant numbers of intel-
